I was wondering if people would be willing to share their recent or
maybe not so recent experiences in using pkgsrc on OpenBSD.
I have not played for a while with pkgsrc and this weekend out of curiosity I installed on one of the testing machines pkgsrc on the top of OpenBSD 4.4 current. Except for the minor glitch with using a.out instead of ELF which was fixed by bumping tnftp to the latest version pkgsrc seems to work fine. I have to confess though that I have not played enough with X clients. Namely I have a strong preference for Xenocara over vanilla Xorg and pkgsrc seems to be playing little bit rough with the native Xorg.

In particular I am interested in people who were running pkgsrc and native packages side by side. It seems that it is fairly easy to keep those apart.

My real interest in pkgsrc steams from the fact that pgksrc number of packages is now almost 8000 and almost 10000 counting wip pacages and definitely contains some interesting software which is non-trivial for porting to OpenBSD. It is also regularly updated with security patches
which is now a big issue when stable packages are gone from OpenBSD.

pkgsrc despite its imperfection seens like a very interesting idea certainly worth of fixing. It is particularly nice for people who are managing several different operating systems. It looks to me as the
best packaging system for Solaris, Slackware, and OS X for now.

I Googled and I saw that somebody had around year 2000 idea for unified
BSD packaging system. Since than various BSD have changed a lot in their base and that might not be possible to do it at all. That seems like a very good idea to me as the human resources are so hard to come by.

I think you may be the only one attempting to use pkgsrc on OpenBSD, Oko. I've seen no discussion of it on ports@ at all. On misc@, I see brief mention in 2006, and an aborted attempt by one user to use it in 2003...

Marc Espie (the "father" of OpenBSD's ports system) discussed pgksrc, his integration of various features of it, and differences which remain in an interview he gave the NetBSD Project for their "10 years of pkgsrc" celebration. His interview starts here: http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/10years.html#espie

I am familiar with the article. There are two other very interesting articles on the same page. One is by a DragonFly developer who is in charge of pkgsrc on DragonFly.
At some point he openly admitted that the times of fully portable pkgsrc might be over. The another one is by two developers in charge of pkgjam which will be replacement of pkgsrc.

I saw couple letters containing stuff about pkgsrc on misc[AT]openbsd in december of last year when people were beaching about lack of 4.2 stable packages. In
one those letters the guy have pretty much described installation and use of pkgsrc on OpenBSD.

I saw couple letter on pkgsrc[AT]netbsd about pkgsrc on OpenBSD in which a.out problem is described. Pkgsrc has been last officially tested for OpenBSD 3.5 but I
saw mails describing testing of pkgsrc on OpenBSD 4.3.
It is possible though that I am the only one who actually run pkgsrc on 4.4 current.
It is not something that should be taken upon lightly as one has to do fair amount of knob tweaking in mk.conf in order for compilations to work but it is definitely possible.

As I said I have not tried to play hard enough with X client. The another thing that I would like to play with are sound clients. It would be interesting to see if the ports requiring kernel support for sound could work.

Just to put a bate to the curious. If the sound does work it could be theoretically possible to compile and run the Skype on OpenBSD (I hope Theo doesn't read this).
NetBSD has a Skype 1.4 in ports which does use OSS. The only problem is that
NetBSD uses OpenSuSE as linux compatibility layer while OpenBSD uses Fedora. I would imagine that OpenSuSE libraries could be hand installed and linked to work on OpenBSD. Obviously all of above would be possible only on i386.

I actually tried this about 2 or 3 OpenBSD releases ago because pkgsrc is by far my favorite package management system of all the BSDs I've tried (imho it spanks ports badly )

I have to say it was a big disappointment because you wind up with much duplication of executables, libraries, etc. If you don't mind having 2 copies of most of your system, it may be worth a try. I was already not happy with FreeBSD's ports bloat compared with my Slackware system so this was too much.

I think I was able to build most but not all of the packages I tried, on OpenBSD. It's been awhile, sorry I don't have more details. One thing I do remember, is I won't try that again! NetBSD is a great OS. If they keep developing it I may run a fulltime NetBSD box.